Penny Rimbaud & Mikado Koko - Acts of Love / Songs to Our Other Selves [2LP]

Format: 2LP
Catalogue No.: CAL007 
Barcode: 5016958102555
Release Date: 22 Sep 2023
Genre: Modern Classical

 Caliban Sounds, in association with One Little Independent Records, are delighted to present, on gatefold 180g double vinyl, Penny Rimbaud’s ‘Acts of Love’ (1984) accompanied by Mikado Koko’s ‘Songs To Our Other Selves’ (2022).
 Presented with the ‘Acts of Love’ 32-page booklet and ‘Songs To Our Other Selves’ insert. The latter is available on vinyl for the first time.
 Having co-founded the anarchist band Crass in 1977, by 1984, Rimbaud felt he needed to explain both the political and personal roots of what increasingly was being seen by press and public alike as the band’s ‘violent anger’. However, in this respect, Rimbaud had always concurred with Che Guevara, who had stated that “the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.” What better, then, than to return to ‘Acts of Love’, to be presented this time as a vinyl LP. Rimbaud would compose the music to feature Eve Libertine on vocals and Paul Ellis on keyboards. Meanwhile, Vaucher set about creating a new set of illustrations to accompany the poems.
 In 2021, avant-garde musician and artist Mikado Koko being a keen admirer of Libertine’s vocals and, having a great fondness for ‘Acts of Love’, contacted Rimbaud with the idea of creating cut-ups of twenty tracks from the album, to create a sister release entitled ‘Songs To Our Other Selves’. When he finally heard the result, he was overjoyed, and the album was released in 2022 on Caliban Sounds.
 Sean Worrall wrote in The Organ, “Mikado Koko has taken Penny Rimbaud’s album ‘Acts of Love’, originally a fifty track album of short poems on love, and cut it up, deconstructed it, reconstructed it, pulled it apart and put it all back together (a lot more than just remixed it) to make a twenty track album of her own. ‘Songs To Our Other Selves’ is an entirely new album, that we’re told that, and rightly so, we should view as a continuation of the original. What we have here are bites, stabs, thrusts of Crass-like noise, art, the art of noise. It is hard-boiled, it is challenging, it might be madness or maybe maddening, the whole thing is glorious actually. Those bites of words, the cut and paste deconstruction, the thrust, words caught, the art of collage, the real art of glorious noise, painting with sound.”

Tracklisting
LP1 - Penny Rimbaud ‘Acts of Love’
Tracks 1-50
LP2 - Mikado Koko ‘Songs to Our Other Selves’
Tracks 1-20